Slipping Rib Syndrome – After Diagnosis

Transcript

After the diagnosis is made, another way to confirm that potentially doing an operation will alleviate the pain and that is indeed the correct diagnosis is by sending them to a pain center to do rib blocks. What this does is numb the nerve that is getting impinged or nipped, and they use local anesthetic for this area, and they’ll inject it. If, after that injection alleviates the pain, they’re actually able to localize exactly which cartilages are affected for me. They document that and the patient has about a two hour pain-free time. Unfortunately, sometimes it can trigger a little bit more pain afterwards. So not everybody loves going there and doing that. In certain centers, they will try treating with nerve blocks over a period of time to try to decrease the amount of pain. And I have some patients that have said, “Let me try that for a while first.” And I say, “Great, this is wonderful.” If the nerve blocks don’t help their pain, I’m very much more reluctant to actually set them up for an operation. I don’t want to do something to them that potentially will not help them in the long run.